At Home at Animal Farm: An Orwell Collection

George Orwell’s Letters Fill Out a Complex Personality

In a life that was relatively brief but exceedingly active, George Orwell was, among other things, a police officer in Burma, a dishwasher in France, a tramp in England, a combatant in Spain, a war correspondent in Germany and a farmer in the Hebrides. Like many people of his era — he was born in 1903 and died in 1950 — he was also a prolific letter writer, and a particularly captivating and thoughtful one at that, thanks partly to the wealth of experience he had acquired.

“George Orwell: A Life in Letters” is a judiciously chosen selection of some of the most interesting of these casual writings, from a 20-year period that included both the Great Depression and World War II. Peter Davison, who selected and annotated the letters, was also the lead editor of Orwell’s 20-volume “Complete Works” and has sought here to distill Orwell’s essence, as man and thinker, into a more manageable size and format.

The letters are appearing a year after the publication of Orwell’s diaries, which focused on the concrete and often mundane details of his daily life, including the number of eggs laid by his hens. This book has a bit of that, too, but more frequently serves as a platform for Orwell to expound on weightier topics, often in terms that still resonate today.

In 1944, for instance, he worried about “a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, i.e., there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted.” He adds that for the same reason, “the exact sciences are endangered.”

As its title suggests, “George Orwell: A Life in Letters” is quite a different enterprise from “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell,” the four-volume work from 1968 that did much to solidify his posthumous reputation as a political clairvoyant. In the new collection, we read not only letters that Orwell wrote, but also some he received, and even a handful that friends and colleagues wrote to one another about him.

The result is a much more rounded image of Orwell and his circle than that provided by the four-volume set, for which his widow, Sonia Brownell Orwell, was a co-editor. Among the chief delights in the new volume is a much sharper image of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who died at 39 during surgery, just before the 1945 publication of “Animal Farm,” whose success would give Orwell his first taste of financial stability. She emerges here as a woman of sparkling wit and intelligence, remarking on her husband’s “extraordinary political simplicity” and mordantly noting that “the English left is always Spartan; they’re fighting Franco to the last Spaniard.”

The letters show that Orwell was shattered by her death, but that he also embarked on an excruciatingly awkward campaign to woo a successor. “There isn’t really anything left in my life except my work and seeing that Richard gets a good start,” he writes to one prospect a year after his wife’s death, referring to the son the couple adopted shortly before she died. “It is only that I feel so desperately alone sometimes. I have hundreds of friends, but no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me.”

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George OrwellCredit
Associated Press

The final sections of “A Life in Letters” abound with other such moments of pathos. The reader knows that Orwell will die of tuberculosis, at the age of 46, in January 1950, and though he, too, suspects that that will be his fate, he often pleads for more time.

“I do want to stay alive at least 10 years, I’ve got such a lot of work to do, besides Richard to look after,” he writes six months before his death. “Of course I’ve had it coming to me all my life,” he also says in the same letter, acknowledging the price he is paying for having subjected himself to privations for so many years.

There are hints here, too, tantalizing but frustrating, of books Orwell had in mind but never got to write. In 1940, he mentions that “I am sort of incubating an enormous novel, the family saga sort of thing,” and, nine years later, talks of “a novel dealing with 1945 in my head now, but even if I survive to write it, I shouldn’t touch it before 1950.”

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To his publisher Fredric Warburg, he confides in 1948 that “I have a stunning idea for a very short novel which has been in my head for years, but I can’t start anything until I am free from high temperatures, etc.”

Because Orwell was so closely identified with the great causes and conflicts of his day, his passion for literature is often overlooked. The letters help rectify that imbalance: he refers often to books he is either reviewing or simply reading for pleasure, and his literary judgments are as idiosyncratic as his politics.

He had little use, for example, for Henry James, who “bores me unbearably,” and thought F. Scott Fitzgerald was overrated: “The Great Gatsby” “seemed to me to lack point” and “Tender Is the Night” “even more so,” he wrote. He championed the neglected 19th-century writer George Gissing, talked up James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” embraced Norman Mailer’s “Naked and the Dead” the instant it was published, and greatly admired Joseph Conrad, who, as “a transplanted Pole,” he wrote, had a “grown-upness and political understanding which would have been almost impossible to a native English writer at that time.” Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, “is a bag of wind, and I am going to give him a good boot.”

The literary friendships Orwell cultivated may also indicate something about his taste, which was catholic, and his nature, which was tolerant of opinions that diverged from his but not of cant. The aristocratic Anthony Powell, author of the novel cycle “A Dance to the Music of Time,” and Henry Miller, whose “Tropic of Cancer” was considered obscene when first published in the 1930s, inhabit very different literary universes, but Orwell corresponded enthusiastically with both.

Perhaps the most intriguing letter here is one written nearly a quarter-century after Orwell’s death by Jacintha Buddicom, a childhood playmate and love interest of the man she knew as Eric Blair. In it, she complains that his use of their romance in the novel “1984” “absolutely destroys me,” but also expresses regret for spurning Orwell.

“How I wish I had been ready for betrothal when Eric asked me to marry him on his return from Burma,” she writes, and adds, “It took me literally years to realize that we are all imperfect creatures, but that Eric was less imperfect than anyone else I ever met.”

GEORGE ORWELL

A Life in Letters

Selected and Annotated by Peter Davison

Illustrated. 542 pages. Liveright Publishing. $35.

A version of this review appears in print on August 20, 2013, on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: At Home at Animal Farm: An Orwell Collection. Today's Paper|Subscribe